ts my own, because those books must be returned more promptly than
to the friend who neither exacts fines nor yet even notes in a book what
book we borrow.

FRANKLIN tells us that "he often sat up reading, the greater part of
the night, when a book borrowed (he means _stolen_) from booksellers in
the evening, was to be returned in the morning lest it should be found
missing." In proportion as men make full proof of books, they become
alike _inside_, in real communion with great authors, in information,
taste, mental capacity, mastery of speech,--accomplishments which cannot
be lost, and which render each one more equal and congenial with his
fellows. Men will still differ by God, not by man. What then is the Free
Library less than the key stone in our Republican arch?

When we would show attention to strangers, it has been a Madison custom
to take them into our cemetery. That grave yard is well worth showing.
But in time to come I trust we shall rather exhibit our Libraries, and
say; "These are our jewels." Not tombs, but living shrines that on the
living still work miracles,--the shrines where all the relics of the
saints full of true virtue are preserved, where the dead live and the
dumb speak--the dead sceptered sovereigns who still rule our spirits
from their urns. This sun of our intellectual worlds is

"Made porous to receive
And drink the liquid light, firm to retain
Its gathered beams, great palace now of light,
Hither as to a fountain countless stars
Repairing in their golden urns draw light."

Let us rejoice in it all glorious within, even as our Capitol and
University parks are without.

A library,--the assembled souls of all men deem most wise, the only men
who speak loud enough for posterity to hear;--reminds me of that fresco
by RAPHAEL, which I admired most of all his Vatican masterpieces,
popularly styled "The School of Athens," and which I hope to see hung up
as the genius of our library hall, as I have seen it in many. In some
one of the fifty-two figures glowing with life in that picture, every
variety of culture has a representative. You see there the practical
man, like FRANKLIN'S Poor Richard, in Diogenes rough and ready by his
tub. Archimedes is drawing a diagram in the sand. On the broad steps of
a temple stand Ptolemy, with the terrestrial and Hipparchus with the
celestial globe. No sage is without a docile retinue. SOCRATES, with sly
humor, is humbling th